The more students, the more money

OCEANSIDE -- Every time a student plays hooky or stays homesick, it costs the Oceanside Unified School District $26 in statefunding.

While that may not seem like much to a district with a $152million budget, absences can add up and cut into the district’sper-student funding, or money the state allocates to schooldistricts based on their average daily attendance.

When mapping out the 2003-04 budget last spring, Oceansideschool officials based their spending plan in part on an averagedaily attendance of 20,604 -- or about $97 million in per-studentfunds from the state.

The rest of the district’s revenues -- or about $55 million --come from the federal government and other state funds designatedfor specific school programs.

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On average, the state gives the Oceanside district about $26 perstudent per day, or about $4,703 per student per year, according todistrict Assistant Superintendent Robyn Phillips.

The more students in school everyday, the higher the district’saverage daily attendance over the course of the year. The districttallies the average attendance monthly and updates its budget basedon that figure.

On Wednesday, 21,746 of the district’s estimated 22,000 studentsshowed up for school, or about 1,000 more than the district’saverage-daily-attendance projections for the year, Phillipssaid.

District attendance technician Raj Villivalam said an average of5 percent of the district’s students are absent each day.

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But if the attendance figures from Wednesday hold up all year --not likely, officials said -- the district would realize about $5.3million more in per-student funds from the state than it expects toreceive with an average daily attendance of 20,604. The $5.3million would be about half of what the district cut last year inschool programs, including $1.5 million in busing for middle andhigh school students.

Phillips said the district, which has been in abudget-tightening mode since last year, may have to turn to raisingattendance as a way of increasing state funds, Phillips said.

Officials are now bracing for mid-year cuts this year, bad newsthey said could be announced as early as December.

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Laurel Elementary School Principal Luis Ibarra said he’sencouraging parents to realize that sickness and emergenciesrepresent legitimate reasons to keep children home, but that familytrips and rainy days are not.

“If the kids are not showing up and they’re on our roll, that’shurting us,” he said.

Tuesday’s enrollment is about 300 fewer than last year’senrollment because of shifts in housing at Camp Pendleton, movingmore students out of the Oceanside district and into other schooldistricts that serve students living on base, she said.